Jun 16 Yann Martel's Writing Studio

There’s not much to my studio. I had it built by a local contractor in my backyard to escape my house, which my four young children — ages 6, 4, 2 and 10 months — and my 19-year-old honorary daughter and my dog and my partner (also a work-at-home writer) make a very busy place, far too busy to write in. My studio is no more than enclosed emptiness, a cube of uncluttered quiet warmth in which I can collect my thoughts and try to marshal them into that difficult form called the novel. I have no books; I’m there to write, not to read. And I don’t care to surround myself with ‘‘Life of Pi’’ memorabilia, say, or with any trinkets or gris-gris. All I need is a clean, well-lighted place as blank as the page I hope to write on.

Novelist Yann Martel quoted in the "A Writer's Room" column from New York Times T Magazine, 2016; Photo by Rich Gilligan